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CauseWired’s Tom Watson spoke at the 2014 Giving Under The Influence Symposium on April 24th at the National Press Club in Washington DC on employee engagement, corporate philanthropy and the work of the nonprofit sector. The panel was sponsored by America’s Charities, a nonprofit coalition of the U.S. charitable organizations that provides workplace charitable giving campaigns, technology and thought […]

Note: Recently, I spent National Philanthropy Day with the Mid-Hudson Valley Chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, and served as the luncheon keynote speaker. This post on the challenges of philanthropy is adapted from that speech. Americans are asked to give – and in fact, do give – more to organized charity than the citizens of any other […]

Great panel at the Washington Post yesterday, as America’s Charities convened its #GivingUndertheInfluence symposium to discuss trends in workplace giving and growing roles of millennials and digital networks. I was honored to join Marc Johnson, vice president of digital strategy in the Studio/Online division of APCO Worldwide; Heather Lofkin Wright, national director of community service […]

Very nice for CauseWired to be included in this guide from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Written by Jennifer James, founder of Mom Bloggers for Social Good, the post focuses on key strategic imperatives for nonprofits and causes as they consider the social graph. Here is CauseWired’s contribution: It’s very easy to jump into […]

In 1731, a 25-year-old Philadelphia printer set out to solve a problem – one that affected the future of his industry and the social good. Despite innovations in technology, popular books still cost too much for the average citizen. Yet getting more books into circulation would clearly increase interest in his own craft, and lead […]

Cross-posted from my Forbes column: Flip the calendar, start a new tax year. Double down on changing the world. That’s about the simplest New Year’s resolution for a social entrepreneur or nonprofit leader. Every January doesn’t require a new strategic plan. Sometimes you need to just keep things on track. But I’d still urge everyone […]

I’m late in announcing this here (on my own site – the cobbler’s children run barefoot, I know) but I’ve signed to write the new Social Ventures blog over at Forbes. I admire what Forbes is doing in terms of bring in a variety of new voices, and I’m enjoying engaging a new audience there […]

Last week, the La Pietra Coalition launched a major new global initiative, the Third Billion Campaign, aimed at expanding women’s employment, access to finance, markets and education. A coalition of business leaders, NGOs, former government officials, economists and commentators (I’m proud to be in their ranks) is spearheading the decade long campaign to galvanize corporations […]

What began as a bold global initiative to challenge the information hegemony of governments and open them to wider, better-informed participation by citizens in the digital age is trickling toward irrelevance and outright shame in the cramped quarters of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, as the leader of the once-revolutionary secret-exposing site Wikileaks uses the […]

This year, I’m honored to be team-teaching a new course at New York University with my friends Marcia Stepanek and Howard Greenstein. The class is “The Wired Nonprofit 2012: Social Media Strategy and Practice” and it’s a new elective in the Heyman Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising Master’s program. The overall goal is to help […]

I’m a story teller by nature and by vocation, so I shivered a little bit when I read this sentence in Mario Morino’s excellent Leap of Reason: Managing to Outcomes in an Era of Scarcity, released earlier this year by his Venture Philanthropy Partners: Public funders—and eventually private funders as well—will migrate away from organizations […]

In its early years, the Clinton Global Initiative often seemed to present a kind of Democratic administration in exile – a gentle yet important correction to the Bush White House. The former President acted as a dealmaker supreme, bringing together big corporate interests, major philanthropists, heads of state and their governments, and global nonprofits in […]

The video for a panel I moderated in April at NYU’s Heyman Center is up, and I thought I’d share it here. It was quite an interesting discussion. Here’s the description: Social media and the resulting mass philanthropy movement are bringing rapid and often destabilizing change to the nonprofit world. This panel discussed how some […]

@tomwatson

When a former President creates a sprawling global charity, and spends his considerable political capital cutting deals to increase funding for major social causes around the world, it’s bound to stir up some dust. But when the former Secretary of State (his spouse) joins the foundation to continue her lifelong pursuit of civil and economic […]

Every smartphone video, every broken family, every outraged community, and every sadly trending hashtag tells an individual story – an incident that should not have happened, a sign that something is seriously broken in the way the criminal justice system treats African-American men and boys. And while we add #BlackLivesMatter to tweets and t-shirts, some […]

After Governor Mike Pence signed the restrictive Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which allows Indiana businesses to turn away customers who may conflict with their religious beliefs, including gay couples, online activists swung into action. #BoycottIndiana became a major trending topic on as former Star Trek star (and human rights activist) George Takei led the charge. Companies like SalesForce and […]

As a consultant who advises nonprofits on development, I often engage in discussions with organizational leaders on reaching “new philanthropists,” especially younger donors who made their piles in technology or finance. By repute, they are driven by data, results, measurable impact, and the use of business methods and technology to solve big problems. And they’re under […]